In the Gallery: Napoleon III’s Paris

A giant public effort to stimulate spending and growth, a governmental agency that oversees mortgages made to low-income people, the establishment of semipublic banking corporations. Rising environmental awareness resulting in scientific farming and model farms. Countless “shovel-ready” public works projects meant to improve urban infrastructure. Not to mention the near-death of newspapers, and handwringing over the effects of new technology on reading and writing.

Welcome to the regime of Napoleon III, otherwise known as Louis Napoleon, which began with a coup in 1851 and ended with France’s surrender to invading Prussian troops in 1871. A little gem of an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art–no catalogue, and two small rooms hidden away like an obscure moment in history–documents that era with photographs and drawings, proving that, for all the turbulent events happening all around us, plus ca change….
An unimposing man with a sallow complexion and such a sad air about him that one of his generals quipped that he resembled a “depressed parrot,” Louis was Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew. He had bungled an attempt at overthrowing the then-monarchical government in 1836, and was sent by the king, Louis Philippe, to America to cool off.

Returning to France in 1840 with 60 co-conspirators, Louis set foot on his native soil and immediately declared the government invalid. He was almost as immediately ordered by an exasperated Louis Philippe to be hauled off to jail. Six years later he disguised himself as a French workman—wooden plank over the shoulder, pipe in the mouth—and walked out of the prison, spending another two years in England before returning to France to get himself elected president of the new republic at the end of 1848. (His uncle’s name didn’t hurt.) In December 1851, Louis overthrew the Second Republic and declared himself Emperor of the French.

Looking at the photographs of mid-19th-century Paris that adorn the walls of this marvelous exhibition is like deja-vu all over again. Louis was a highly intelligent hybrid composed of several different political components. He was arrogant, to be sure—you don’t overthrow a government and take control of a country without being that. But he was also, for all his passionate commitment to the free market, a self-proclaimed “socialist—go figure—whose empathy for the poor inspired him to create the first government hospital for injured workers, and to push for free education for all citizens. His vast public-works projects in the cities and the countryside make the New Deal look like an after-school project.

Met

“Old Paris”

Victor Hugo, who in his myopic politics sometimes sounded like the Ralph Nader of his day, wrote hysterically after Louis’s coup that “the future has been stabbed to death by a ferocious bandit.” That sounds slightly better in French, but it couldn’t have been further from reality. True, Louis robbed Parliament of the right to debate, closed down dozens of newspapers and journals, and had police agents keep close tabs on his subjects and also bully them from time to time. But for the first eight years of his regime, few people complained. In the free elections of 1857, government candidates won 5,500,000 votes while the opposition received just 665,000.

Louis’s popularity had a lot to do with the fact that Parliament was riddled with corruption and cronyism to begin with, the newspapers’ quality was about on a par with Parliament’s morality, and the mostly Clouseau-like police “surveillance” was not as onerous as Louis’s economic policies were successful. Under his regime, prosperity lifted all segments of society.
And when the public started to feel that his despotism was outweighing his benevolence, Louis made an about-face, taking his foot off Parliament, the press, and the people.
The most revolutionary changes under Louis were architectural. Louis asked his architect, Baron Haussmann—the Robert Moses of his day—to redesign Paris from top to bottom, and Hausmann obliged, demolishing the narrow winding streets that dated from medieval times, and creating the ample, breathtaking boulevards of today. Louis had in mind widening the streets to make it easier for troops to move in and put down an insurrection, but the result was, as we like to say, an utterly new urban “transparency,” where one could see and be seen. Some of the exhibition’s most striking photographs are of Paris before and after Haussmann’s transformations.

For all Louis’s early suppressions of free speech, the arts flourished under his government. The advent of photography had writers and intellectuals worrying that the printed word would be eclipsed by mechanical reproduction—Proust refused to use a camera, explaining that it interfered with the process of memory—but instead, the new technology inspired figures like Manet, Degas and Cezanne, painters whose flat planes borrowed from photography to push painting into its next adventurous phase.

Met

“Destroyed column in the Place Vendome, 1871”

Louis’ reign came to an end in 1871, with Germany’s victory over France. In the wake of Germany’s withdrawal, monarchists fought with republicans, socialists, utopians, and anarchists. To their amazement, the radicals won and occupied Paris for several months, establishing what they called the Commune, in honor of the political body that had overthrown Louis XVI At the end of May 1871, the government ruthlessly liquidated the last remnants of the Commune–the show has several dramatic photographs of the rubbled aftermath–and eight years later, the long reign of the Third Republic began. The economy, newspapers, and culture in general all survived.
In other words, this—i.e. everything whirling around us—too shall pass.

About Speakeasy

Speakeasy is a blog covering media, entertainment, celebrity and the arts. The publication is produced by Barbara Chai and Jonathan Welsh with contributions from the Wall Street Journal staff and others. Write to us at speakeasy@wsj.com or follow us on Twitter at @WSJSpeakeasy or individually @barbarachai.